Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/190

 A similarity has been said to be nothing but a slight difference. When the difference becomes a good deal more than slight, the similarity may disappear and difference take its place. There is a curious and interesting illustration of this subtle connection between similarity and difference afforded by the similarity and difference between the French and English aristocracy. In the eighteenth century the French aristocracy paid no taxes. Was there ever a time when the English aristocracy paid no taxes? In the nineteenth century, as General Perronet Thompson has observed in his Catechism on the Corn Laws, the English aristocracy paid taxes and recovered them through another tax, the Corn Law, that caused the community to lose the amount ten times over. On this result General Thompson observes, "We are prodigiously stupid. Our posterity will have very little to say about the wisdom of their ancestors."

But the difference between the French and the English aristocracy is here very curiously manifested. The French aristocracy paid no taxes; the English aristocracy paid taxes but not their due proportion of taxes; and recovered far more than they paid through another tax, the Corn Law. The French aristocracy were destroyed by the people they had long robbed and oppressed. For